Sound trucks blared the order: “Wear shoes when you come to town, put on clean clothes, look tidy and decent. It is a shame to go walking around barefoot in your country’s capital.” Having just raised the minimum wage in Haiti from 50¢ to 70¢ a day, up-&-coming President Dumarsais Estimé was out to improve the appearance and living standards of his mouse-poor people.
He had borrowed from the book of Henri Christophe, the slaveborn general who helped free Haiti from the French, in 1811 proclaimed himself King Henry I. A Christophe decree, later made law, ordered that people coming to town on feast days should be neatly dressed. The democratic Estime revived it as one means of making Haiti as prosperous as it had been under the high-handed Christophe.
Estimé reasoned that if people had to wear shoes, they would work harder to get the money to buy them; if they worked harder, they would produce more food and make more money. Besides, a well-dressed people would make a better impression on the tourists President Estimé hopes to see flocking to Haiti to share its easygoing life and to visit the brooding ruins of Christophe’s vast citadel.
Last week, there were fewer ill-clad and unshod in Port-au-Prince, the capital. Peasants walked barefoot down the mountains with shoes in their hands, grumblingly put them on at the city gates. Said one young Haitian: “What an idea, dressing up every day as if it were a holiday! My shoes have been in good condition for five years, but if I have to put them on all the time, I’ll wear them out.”
* From his life, Playwright Eugene O’Neill got plot and setting for Emperor Jones.
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